As we barrel towards June 23rd and a vote which is increasingly less about the UK’s future in the EU and more about wanting to be able to gloat at those fuckers on Facebook – formerly your friends and family – who have lost, it strikes me that nobody is considering the vote’s aftermath.

Not the long-term economic repercussions of this decision, or that decision, not what it will do to your house price, the job market, interest rates, the world economy or the trail of people leaving Syria for somewhere less bomby.

I’m talking about the whole of the UK becoming an un-liveable hell-hole.

Whichever side “wins”.

Your expectation is that June 24 will be the first day where whatever we’ve voted to happen happens; that the wild speculation about what a vote to Leave/Remain leave will decrease and be replaced by analysis of what’s actually happening.  In fact the onslaught that begins on the day the result is announced will make the past 3 months feel like not drowning in speculative bullshit at all.

Whichever side wins on the 23rd an alternative reality will be created, like Schengen Area’s cat.  This will be a faerie realm, a place where the wildest dreams of the losing side reached fruition.

If Leave win then every economic hiccup will have a mirror in the realm of Schadenfreude’s cat.  Inflation up? Its down in the unreachable kingdom of ‘Remain’.  Unemployment up? Over there there are jobs to spare. Their trade is balanced, their rights are freer than ever, even their agricultural policy is common enough for a tomato ketchup sandwich and a flutter on the dogs.  June 23 2016 will mark the end of a golden age and everything bad that happens from that date forward will be the fault of those who voted to Leave. Everything from that time forward, be it economic, environmental, political, act of God, will be less than 6 steps removed from “…because we voted to leave the EU!”

Meanwhile, a Remain win ensures that the £350 million per week – whether it’s real or not, whether it could or would be spent on the NHS or not – will become the hardest working money in healthcare.  If hospitals are understaffed then the £350 million would have fixed that, as well as removing the need to charge visitors for parking, making sure your GP didn’t have a West Indian accent and could be visited this epoch.  If your granny has a fall and fractures her skull then under the super-funded NHS she’d have already been equipped with a gyroscopic exoskeleton, she’d have been less little old lady and more The six million dollar nan (and in that world there’s no chance that $6m would be worth significantly more than £350m).  Every single migrant will be the fault of those who voted to stay in the EU; whether they’re lazing about claiming benefits, stealing an Englishman’s job, poking their foreign nose into local issues or simply refusing to integrate.

And these parallel worlds last forever.

When the sun becomes an orange giant and swallows up the Earth, five billion years from now, an alien observer might note a brief white flash as it consumes the very last hot-take on “Why we got it wrong”.

One suspects that  a lot of people who are “politically active” are starting to welcome this never-ending me-me-melee. My personal anger at the people I’ve argued with on-line over the last 6 weeks is now beyond satiation with a week of  “Ha! Ha! You lost!” taunting.  I want a lifetime of being able to say, “This is all your fault, you fucking idiot!”.  As I’ve never seen anybody, engaged or disengaged, show the slightest sign of changing their mind on their vote though any debate I think that most of the movement between camps is people, like me, deciding that they’d rather boo those they detest than do what’s best.

You also wonder if some of it is traffic the other way – the senior figures in both campaigns, either of which could win, must be realising that they may have to deliver.  This is much more of a problem for the Leave campaign – after all, Remain is just offering ‘steady as she goes’ – to the extent it’s almost impossible to imagine, say, Farage without his perennial scapegoats of immigrants and EU regulations to beat.  Should Leave win on the 23rd I fully expect that 24/6 will see him giving a live interview where his initial victory howl turns into one of pain, as what little substance he has deserts him and he crumbles to dust, leaving only an empty suit and a half-smoked fag.

He’d be getting off easy.  The rest of us will have the rest of our lives, 24/7, starting 24/6, to share the world with those we branded racists or worse, putting us in mind of George Orwell’s words, “If you want an image of the future image having to face the humans you’ve booed and stamped, forever”.

Words more chilling now than when he wrote them in 1984.

[Author’s note: This post started life as a series of tweets, which you can read here. Hopefully I’ve managed to fix all of the typos.]

SNP Scottish GCSE Maths

Time allowed: 1 hour

Instructions

1. DO NOT USE PENCIL! NEVER. Y’CANNA TRUST “THEM”
2. Attempt all the questions
3. Show your working out, unless doing so would be embarrassing
4. There are a total of 100 marks available.  Probably. Please let us know if there aren’t
5. If you can’t answer any of the maths questions then please write “What does a dog-food salesman know, anyway?” in the answer space.

Question 1.

You are told that X has a value such that:

X² – 11X + 10 = 0

Answer either part (a) or part (b) below.

a) Calculate the value of X, show your working

(5 marks)

OR

b) Draw the X so it looks like a wee blue and white flag

(15 marks)

Answer: ________________________

Question 2.

A country holds a referendum asking, “Should we be an independent country?”

2,001,926 people, which is 55.3% of the voters, answer “No”.

Explain in detail how statistical methods can show that they were wrong, their opinion should be disregarded and they should be asked the same question again next year, to see if they get it right.

Answer: ________________________

(250 marks and a Holyrood job, guaranteed)

Question 3.

Every year the Scottish government produces a special report that shows its income and expenditure.

This year the report shows that the government has an income of £x and a total expenditure of £y.

Without knowing the value of x or y tick which of the following statements that you know to be TRUE.

a. Saying y is greater than x is just talking Scotland down

b. The value of x would, somehow, be much higher if Scotland was independent

c. There is a high probability the report is biased against Scotland

d. We’ve got a bonny flag and we wave it lots

e. Oil was always just a bonus

f. The wee blue book is the only report I trust!

(5 marks for each one you tick)

Question 4.

The average value of a house in Lambeth is £850,000.

Andrew can walk from his house in Lambeth to his job as an MP, in Westminster, in 15 minutes.

Andrew’s salary is £75,000 per annum.

Assume that Andrew’s salary is based on 220 8-hours days per annum and that he includes his time walking to and from work in his working day.

If Andrew is walking at 4 miles per hour then calculate how far Andrew would have to walk in order to earn the value of his house.

While you’re distracted doing that Andrew will claim £42,000 on expenses for hotels in Westminster.

In the space below write why Westminster is so “wasteful”.

Answer: ________________________ (Hint: It’s because of the Tories)

(5 marks)

Question 5.

Nicola has 63 sweets.  If she had 2 more sweets then she’d have more sweets than all of the other children combined.

Ruth has 31 sweets.

In the space below write down all of the bad things that you think should happen to Ruth for not giving her sweets to Nicola, and tell us what you most dislike about Ruth.

Answer: ______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

______________________________________________________________

(20 marks)

Question 6.

Kezia says that if taxes on the 1% of the population earning over £150,000/year were raised by 5 percentage points then her country could offset some of the Conservative government’s austerity measures.

Show why Kezia is a traitor by completing the sentence below using the biggest number you can pluck out of your arse.

Answer: “If we do that without being independent then ____________________ people will leave Scotland!”

(10 marks)

Question 7.

The graph below shows the changing price of crude oil over a number of years.

a) Using the graph paper provided draw a better graph, one that proves that Alex was right all along.

(10 marks)

b) On the same graph draw a line showing whisky export duty. Label this line “Thieving English cunts”

(25 marks)

c) From the graph given estimate when crude oil prices will reach $0 per barrel.  Explain how you’d defer declaring Nicola’s Jockopter to the Electoral Commission until that date.

Answer: ________________________

(100 marks, and a shot in a Jockopter)

Question 8.

The Named Person programme is designed to use a single point of contact to help avoid human error, miscommunication and people “slipping through the cracks” in serious child protection cases.

The government have allotted £61 million per annum to this programme.

The government have decided it will apply to all children up to the age of 19, of which there are 1.2 million.

a) Use maths to calculate how much money, per annum, has been allocated to each child.

Answer: ________________________

(5 marks)

b) Explain what fucking good fifty quid per child is supposed to do.

Answer: ____________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________

___________________________________________________________________

(50 marks for anything, anything at all, really)

c) Assuming that:

• The majority of named persons will be teachers
• There is roughly one teacher per 30 children
• All of the money from answer (a) is given directly to the teachers
• Each child the teacher is responsible for will generate an average of 2 hours of case work per month

Explain how the teachers would be better off flipping burgers in McDonalds.

Show your depression and anger.

Answer: ________________________

(No marks, but if you smile at your maths teacher next time you see them perhaps they’ll let you “go large” for free)

Question 9.

Natalie has £30,000.

The following table shows how many police officers Natalie has talked to over the last 6 months.

a) Estimate how many police officers Natalie will see in June.

Answer: ________________________

(5 marks)

b) If Natalie gets 1 month in prison for each £1,000 she cannot account for, but is automatically paroled when she has served ½ of her sentence then, in years and months, how long will she spend sharpening her toothbrush into a crude weapon in Cornton Vale?

Answer: ______Years, _______ Months

(14¼ marks)

Question 10.

Dave wants to buy a house for £150,000, and he has a deposit of £20,000.

Unfortunately his mortgage lender demands a deposit of 20%.

A short time later Dave has his house, Michelle has £10,000 that was Dave’s and Michelle’s solicitor has been struck off by the Scottish Law Society.

Calculate an appropriate length of time for the Law Society to wait before telling the police about any of of this.

Answer: ______Years, _______ Months

(25 marks)

Bonus Question.

The graph below shows the percentages of pupils in different age groups performing “well” or “very well” in numeracy for 2011, 2013 and 2015.

Explain the graph.  Please, please, help us out and explain the damn graph.  We’ll take anything; undelivered vows, depression caused by the SNP not getting a majority, anxiety at the EU referendum…anything that means we don’t have to take responsibility.

Come on, son, gi’ it your best shot.

Answer: ________________________

(A* marks, straight off the bat)

End of exam, go and have a Bucky!

Let’s get right to the point.

New Top Gear is rubbish because it’s too easy.

Old, old Top Gear – the one where people like your dad would look at engines and talk about turning circles – was rubbish because it was boring.  When they, to borrow a phrase from youth, “re-booted” it in 2002 they had the brilliant idea of making each episode an extended game of “spot the difference”.

At first Old new Top Gear was easy as well; a new bloke (James something) would pop up and talk about how to save a couple of grand on a brand new VW Passat, or they’d do something that you and your mates have drunkenly discussed doing – like spending£1,500 on a Porsche and then trying to drive it.

But that was just to get you hooked.

Over the next 14 years the differences got harder to spot.  Was that a new lens-flare? Surely last week’s super-car was “sunset yellow”, not “ripped-to-my-tits orange”. Does a Hitler joke count as being racist to the Germans, as usual,  or to the Austrians?

By the time old new Top Gear punched-out the differences were minute…”Got it! Last week the attractive blonde in the audience was to Clarkson’s left!”

But new new Top Gear has ruined all of that. The main presenter was wearing different clothes, bits of their track involved mud, the little one with the man-made teeth had misplaced his regional accent, old jokes – the pitiful, broken-down, alcoholics at the bar of wit – had gone. By half-way through the programme my spotter’s guide (which, normally at this point would read only “Old one didn’t take the piss out of the new Porsche’s that nearly no-one watching can afford” was instead half-full of scrawled notes. The stars – yes, stars…2 of them, unrelated to each other! – weren’t been given the usual generous air-time to bleat on about their latest projects and were, instead, being forced to talk about cars! Somebody made an entirely new joke! “Clarkson” was suddenly a person who is mad about cars, yet hasn’t been getting paid to drive them since 1979!

So, all-in-all, a dismal failure. The differences were far too easy to spot all over the place. The whole experience was like walking into ones’ favourite pub only to find that they’ve widen the range of menu, put on some guest ales and made the pool table free.

Apparently some people watch it just for the car content. To them this new new Top Gear must seem fantastic; all of the cars, but with a new breath of life and without the same, tedious old jokes being shoe-horned in just because the audience have neither the wit nor the inclination to stomach anything that is even the slightest bit new.

Yes, you’d imagine that they’d be very please…although they do seem surprisingly hard to spot.

Inspired by the LabourList article on how a Corbyn-led Labour could win I’d like to add a few points that they may have missed.

1) All we need is a bit of luck

In the 2015 General Election the Conservatives pipped Labour to the post by only 1,987,272 votes.  Really that’s only a tiny number when compared to, say, the entire population of the world; and when you think about it in terms of how many people might be too poorly to go to the polling station on the day, or might forget that they’ve got something to do, or might accidentally tick the wrong box, or might get confused and spoil their paper it’s really hardly any at all.

All we need is for those things to happen exclusively to Tory voters and we’re in with a chance.  I think it would be crossing a line to suggest, in a scholarly article, that voodoo and mind-control work, but I think it’s worth trying them.

2) Maybe the Tories will do something really bad

It may be the case that the Tories can impose austerity upon the country, slash benefits, even for the disabled, ravish our beloved health service, treat Chris Grayling as if he’s competent and make us choose between BoJo and Osborne for our next Prime Minister and still be ahead in the polls, but we can’t discount the possibility that in the next 4 years they’ll manage to do something so bad that even the British public can’t stomach it.  We’re not sure what that thing is (it can’t be Hitler-related, we’ve got that bag sown up), but if you do know then please e-mail conservative_policy_shop@AOL.com (all lower-case, apart from the AOL bit), remember to mark your e-mail, “I’ve got a really good idea”.

3) Look to Horizon

The BBC’s Horizon programme has been telling us for years that human life is about to be nearly wiped out; be it super-volcano, meteor-strike, unstoppable virus, mega-tsunami, unprecedented solar storm or killer AIs there’s always something about to push us to the brink of extinction.  If something like that were to reduce the UK population to a size small enough for each of them to personally meet Jeremy and get to know him then we feel he could win them over.

4) Where are our Woodward and Bernstein?

As we know the Labour Party has been the victim of a massive conspiracy between the Blairites, the MSM, the Zionists, the Tories and a whole bunch of other false flag wavers.  All we need are a couple of plucky investigative journalists to start tugging at threads and then publicise the lot and bring down the whole cabal.  We’ve tried creating our own ‘Deep Throat’ but it turns out The Guardian have blocked Ken’s number.

5) Veni, Vidi, Vichy

When Nazi Germany invaded France, during World War II, the seat of government was moved to Vichy in Southern France, but quickly became a puppet government, run – in all but name – by the Nazi party.  And, you know what, we’d take that.  With President Trump on the horizon (although, ironically, never on Horizon) international relations with China, all of the Middle-East, North Korea, Belgium, etc. are all about to get a lot worse and as the de facto 51st state of the US there’s a good chance we’re going to take some of the flack.  Labour stands ready to bow down before the invaders, whoever they may be, and form an “independent” and “free” UK government.  It may seem cowardly, but compared to coming to seat-by-seat agreements with the Greens not to stand it doesn’t seem that bad, does it?

A little while ago a person I follow on Twitter posted this:

Now I’m going to be honest with you; from time to time I do wonder if that particular account is a parody or not. I’ve asked cleverer Twitter users than me (i.e. women) and they think she’s a legit account, and I’m happy to take their word for it.

Re-branding idiots as “neuroatypical” may seem strange – “arguing with morons” is after all pretty much Twitter’s business plan – but when I was a lad men who dressed in ladies’ clothes did so furtively, were called transvestites and we laughed at them, now they do it openly, we call them women and say they’re “brave”…so these things do change.

This subject got me thinking about my own disability, which I rarely mention.  You see, I was born without a sense of rhythm. I’m not saying that this is a proper disability.  It’s not life-threatening (if, like me, you’re from a Catholic family, it could be said to be quite the opposite), but if we’re handing out badges that protect people from cruel laughter and name calling then I want in on that before the idiots and morons ruin the gig for everyone.

Let’s put my disability into context; given something like Queen’s “We will rock you” I can clap along if I really concentrate.  Anything more rhythmically complex is beyond me. The main upshot of this is that people laugh at me, like I was some kind of neuroatypical!  They don’t just laugh, of course, they go out of their way to set up myself and fellow arhythmics for laughs.  You wouldn’t dream of, say, organising clay-pigeon shooting and then encourage your blind mate to come along and fall about laughing as he blasts the living shit out of anything you point him at. If, however, there’s a chance to take somebody who couldn’t find a beat in a health-food store along to a karaoke evening then that’s fine and fucking dandy.

My fellow sufferers have known many bad times.  Remember that for a lot of history your ability to attract a mate was directly linked to your ability to dance, for the arhythmics this rock to woo and the eugenics of the discos could have been the end of us!

The matter of appropriate reparations for these slights will, in my opinion, be settled to the satisfaction of all with an Olympic games for those with crap disabilities.  We don’t want to be part of the Paralympics – the ‘para-‘ prefix denoting that the participates rise above and beyond serious impairments to compete at an incredible level.  For us, the crappily disabled, the “sub-” prefix seems more appropriate.

I really want to see this, from the glorious opening ceremony – where Danny Boyle, dishevelled and hallucinating after 8 weeks of work with only 80 hours of sleep – weeps at the sight of 1,000 arhythmics dancing to the same tune, with approximately 800 different beats right through to the proud moment that our afflicted hurdlers stand on the podium, the blood proudly streaming from their shattered noses.

I’m not just advocating the sublympics for those who lack musical talent. Won’t we all feel our hearts swell when a British sublympian breaks through the 4-day record in the marathon for people with no sense of direction? Imagine being in the stadium as it shakes and creaks during the 100 meters for the morbidly obese! The synchronised-swimming for the humourless can safely take place in the pool as the final contestant from the high-diving for acrophobics is coaxed down from the board.

And let’s not forget the “neuroatypical”.  I suggest we enter them for the javelin and archery events.

Let’s see who’s laughing then.

What is The Canard?

We are a new media enterprise, designed to shake-up the stagnant business model of the Zionist-controlled main-stream media by going to any lengths to tell people exactly what they want to hear.  We promise to leave no stone unturned in our efforts to find out the truth (about what makes you click on the damn links).

Am I the right sort of person to write for The Canard?

Writing for The Canard takes a special kind of person, so consider the following question and then pick the most honest answer you can.

“When it comes to journalism I am passionate about…”

a. “…finding the real story, not just reporting the same as other news outlets.”

b. “…giving my readers the best possible information, even if it’s complex or challenges their biases.”

c. “…combining my world-class writing with my in-depth knowledge to create award-winning articles.”

d. “…having enough money to pay my loan-shark, before he demonstrates why he’s called ‘The Shylock of the bollock’.”

if you answered a,b, c or d then “Welcome aboard!”…unless you took at face value our advice to ‘pick the most honest answer’, in which case we might have a few problems between now and the point when you learn to read between the fucking lines.

How do I write for The Canard?

The Canard is based on socialist principles, so we’ve made the link between the money and the “talent” as direct as possible; every time somebody clicks on one of our links we get paid and you get paid, 50/50. A beautiful, pure socialist even split between you – the person doing all of the work – and us, doing other stuff…important stuff.

We’re certainly not encouraging you to write the most dreadful kind of click-bait, we’re just giving you the clear choice between the reward of writing truly great pieces of journalism or the much more tangible reward of not having to look through bins for half-eaten burgers.  So there’s your choice, ‘Woodward and Bernstein’ or ‘Kardashians and meal-time’.

What should I write for The Canard?

Obviously the gold-standard of journalism is ‘the truth’, but great philosophers have debated “What is truth?” for thousands of years without reaching a proper answer, so it’s unlikely you’re going to accidentally stumble upon it as you eke out your dwindling reserves of self-respect at £0.000007 per click.

What we can all agree on is that truth ≠ things that have happened.  For example, if somebody’s written about something in a blog, e.g. that the Tories eat children, then while the headline Cam the cannibal may not be literally true it is true that somebody has written about it, and if you’re reporting that then you’re reporting the “truth”.  Whether the source material is true is the concern of the blogger (and bloggers are notorious for rigorously fact-checking anyway, so it will be fine).

Remember that what we’re looking for here is a good headline to entice people to click, so don’t just limit yourself to ‘serious’ blogs; you can report equally easily on opinion pieces, parody pieces, small sections of real other news sources taken out of context, fictional books, dreams, etc.

And if all of those sources fail you then you probably still have enough wit about you to have an opinion.  It doesn’t even have to be an original or insightful opinion – you might even be better off avoiding those things. People get scared by the new and complicated, and those two words are direct synonyms for “original” and “insightful”, but “scared” and “likely to click and put a fraction of a penny in your pocket” are antonyms!

How do I maximise my income?

Play to what people want to read. If your headline is “Why David Cameron cannot win another general election” then your opinion that it’s “Because he is a cunt and I literally lack the wit to understand why anybody would vote for him” is a perfectly valid one.  Why write more than that, it’s not like you’re being paid by the word.

With that in mind always aim for conciseness. Take, for example, the turning of schools into academies.  This is a complex subject, some feel it is privatisation sneaking into state education, but there is a debate to be had over whether local authority control of schools has always produced the optimum results for children.  In juggling those competing view points you’ll want to cut to the nub of it with a headline like, “Why the Tories want poor children to fail!”

You get well paid when something you write goes viral and news articles that go viral are ones that confirm and support the readers’ beliefs.  We’re targeting supporters of Jeremy Corbyn, who already believe that they’re victims of multiple conspiracy theories, that Putin is on their side, that Daily Mirror polls prove something, that all other polls are always wrong in their favour, that the SNP are socialists, that the Zionists are fabricating anti-Semitism stories about them, that anybody right of Mao is a #RedTory, that taxing the rich is an endless source of money, that socialism is the righteous path to a promised land overflowing with unicorns and magic and even that Corbyn is electable.  We’d never belittle the intelligence of our readership, but you’re trying to get pre-school children to like you and you’re armed with chocolates, puppies and the soundtrack to Frozen.

What if it all goes wrong?

Don’t worry, we’ve got your back. Any criticism of you, or us, is part of a conspiracy and if we need some legal work doing we’ll crowd-fund it from indignant middle-classes who form our readership.  Or we’ll drop you quicker than Jeremy’s face when Hilary Benn starts speaking.

Won’t The Canard‘s readers spot this is all a soft-soap job?

Hahahahaha!

Hahahahahaha!

Ha!

Haha!

Ha!

This is why we like you so much

 

 

SCENE 1

Int., a well appointed kitchen, naturally lit by early evening sunshine.

BALUSTRADE LANYARD is cooking. He is whistling happily and is wearing an apron printed with the Israeli flag.

A door slams off stage

BALUSTRADE:     (Calling out) Is that you, honey?

The sounds of somebody throwing things down, stomping round and slamming cupboard doors in another room can be heard.

BALUSTRADE:    (Still calling, but now uncertain) How’s your day been?  Good?

NATALIE enters the kitchen. Her hair is dishevelled, her clothes are torn and her face is dirty.

BALUSTRADE:     Not good, then?

NATALIE:     You are blocked from following @NatalieMcgarry and viewing @NatalieMcgarry’s Tweets.

BALUSTRADE:     Ten thousand pounds?  Oh, that’s a shame.  Still, it’s only money and that other money you found will help out, eh?

NATALIE:     You are blocked from following @NatalieMcgarry and viewing @NatalieMcgarry’s Tweets.

BALUSTRADE:    Really?  That’s barbaric…it’s like being placed in the stocks in medieval times. (Pauses) But, well, it is only for a fortnight and then you can delete it and forget all about this nonsense.

NATALIE shows BALUSTRADE the index finger of her right hand.

NATALIE:     (Sadly) You are blocked from following @NatalieMcgarry and viewing @NatalieMcgarry’s Tweets.

BALUSTRADE:    That’s a nasty blister. Let me get you some ice to put on it (he goes to the fridge to do so). You can still see my tweets, right?

NATALIE:     (Cheering up a little) You are blocked from following @NatalieMcgarry and viewing @NatalieMcgarry’s Tweets.

BALUSTRADE wraps the ice in a tea-towel and tenderly applies it to NATALIE’s finger.

BALUSTRADE:     (Chuckling) Oh well, I never tweet anything worth reading anyway.

A doorbell rings

NATALIE:     (Puzzled) You are blocked from following @NatalieMcgarry and viewing @NatalieMcgarry’s Tweets.

BALUSTRADE:     We’ve got that dinner party tonight, don’t you remember?  Gosh, you really are a scatter-brain, aren’t you?

NATALIE:     You are blocked from following @NatalieMcgarry and viewing @NatalieMcgarry’s Tweets.

BALUSTRADE:     I know, but they’re our friends, and having them round will help cheer you up.  They won’t be here late.

The doorbell rings again

BALUSTRADE:     You just relax, grab yourself a drink and I’ll go and let them in.

BALUSTRADE leaves the kitchen, NATALIE brushes herself down, runs her fingers through her hair and peeks into one of the pots on the range.

BALUSTRADE re-enters, followed by MO, GORGEOUS GEORGE and CHEGGERS. They are all smartly, but causally dressed. GORGEOUS GEORGE carries a bottle of Buckfast™

NATALIE:     You are blocked from following @NatalieMcgarry and viewing @NatalieMcgarry’s Tweets.

GORGEOUS GEORGE:     (Handing bottle to NATALIE) You are blocked from following @GeorgeGalloway and viewing @GeorgeGalloway’s Tweets.

NATALIE:     (Coyly) You are blocked from following @NatalieMcgarry and viewing @NatalieMcgarry’s Tweets.

MO:     You are blocked from following @MoAnsar and viewing @MoAnsar’s Tweets.

BALUSTRADE LANYARD, NATALIE, GORGEOUS GEORGE and CHEGGERS laugh long and hard at this brilliant joke.

CHEGGERS:     (Slightly sadly) You are blocked from following @KeithChegwin and viewing @KeithChegwin’s Tweets.

BALUSTRADE:     Oh you will, Cheggers, you will!

END OF SCENE 1

PLAY FULL-TIME WHISTLE

Audience gives standing ovation. Play runs longer than The Mousetrap. I win some kind of award, perhaps one of those play-Oscars…whatever they’re called.

 

Need to get rid of some lefties who have taken over your party and are looking dangerously electable (because the polls say they haven’t got a hope in hell and polls are now always wrong)?

Not a problem, here’s how to construct a simple witch-hunt that will have them hounded out of power before you can say ‘Zionist’.

1. Arrange for a rising star of the party to share some questionable material.  This material needs to be risqué enough that you can later point to it as ‘anti-Semitic’, but not so far out there that somebody interested in politics might be able to spot that suggesting the forcible transportation of all Israelis to a new country might sound a bit…well, a bit like saying, “Get on the train; it’s taking you to your new home!”
2. Use so-far-right-they-wouldn’t-even-describe-themselves-a-as-Blairite blogger, Guido Fawkes, as your monkey’s paw to get these posts into the limelight at just the right time. Don’t use one of those journalists in the Zionist-controlled media to do it, because they’ve been banging on about the far-left’s anti-Semitism problem for months and months, so nobody takes any notice of them.
3. Use the journalists in the Zionist-controlled media to amplify the blogger’s claims of anti-Zionism, because they have huge influence and everybody takes notice of them.

 

 

4. Pray that natural leader of men, Jeremy Corbyn, dithers a little bit on how to react to the revelations, making him look, at best, weak and, at worse, unsure of exactly what is anti-Semitic, even when Labour supporters who are experts in anti-Semitism are yelling in his face.
5. Hope that Ken Livingstone decides to get involved, and then hope that Ken Livingstone makes a massive tit of himself, and then hope that Ken Livingstone rather than shutting up, pausing and then issuing a carefully considered apology, keeps on digging himself deeper into the shit.
6. Tell the chair of the all-party parliamentary committee against anti-Semitism that they need to be so angry about “Anti-Semitism” that they shout abuse at Ken Livingstone in public. Remember that the Labour party isn’t really anti-Semitic, so this will be manufactured outrage. (Bonus: It’s very unlikely, but possible, that natural leader of men, Jeremy Corbyn, will also dither about whether to suspend Livingstone or Mann, or both, or neither…but this is really too much to hope for).
7. Rely on the rank and file of the party, who are honour bound to defend truth and justice, to fill the ‘net with shouts that there is no anti-Semitism in Labour, that anything can be written off as just criticisms of Israel, that nobody uses ‘anti-Zionist’ as a shield for anti-Semitic comments and that any Jewish writers, or writers working for the BBC or the Murdoch press are “biased”. You can also rely on them to back up the factual accuracy of any little-studied historical events that Ken may have alluded to and they will have found the one Wikipedia article that proves he’s right.
8. Meanwhile, your Blairite supporters are such brainless sheeple that they’ll naturally take your lead and agree that the party is rife with anti-Semitism, despite all of the carefully considered social media posts from the left of the party, claiming that the Jews are framing them.  They’ll also probably only be familiar with the works of actual historians, biased documentaries masquerading as facts and basic educational texts, so they’ll be unaware of the Wikipedia article supporting and Ken and be convinced that he’s wrong.  Idiots.

9. Meanwhile, make sure the Zionist-controlled media keeping going on about the crisis, and make sure that natural leader of men, Jeremy Corbyn, keeps being uncertain about whether there’s a crisis, or what it’s actually about.
10. The party membership is now at each others’ throats. Things will be said that can’t be unsaid, the leader will look weak and the party can be regained by Blairites by [Insert conspiracy device here.  Aliens, perhaps]

Congratulations – in just 10 easy to follow steps you have regained control of your party, which is now fragmented, criss-crossed with deep wounds that will take decades to heal, tarnished with the stain of anti-Semitism and be unelectable.  Which is just what the Blairites want.

Next week: How to rig elections so that an “enormously popular” leader appears to do very badly.

 

Normally when I write a blog I tweet links to it, post links on Facebook, generally point people in its direction.

But not this one. This is a secret blog, published at midnight, with no publicity and no entry in the index of posts.

It has just become 1 May 2016, at this time 16 years ago I was drunk and hiding.  Well, not so much hiding as keeping out of the way, because my next-door neighbour was being sick in my kitchen sink and I really didn’t want to have to deal with that.  In about 5½ hours a doctor is going to make the decision that my wife, who’s been in hospital for almost all of the last month, can no longer manage to keep both herself and the baby she’s carrying alive and that an emergency caesarian section is needed. Somebody will be tasked with phoning me, which will wake not only me but also my parents, my in-laws and my brother – all of whom are visiting for the bank holiday weekend. We’re all very hungover.

At just after 8am, around 4 minutes after the first incision, my first child, my daughter will arrive, purple and screaming, 6 weeks premature, and weighing 3lb 11½oz.  Today is her 16th birthday.

The time that my wife spent in hospital reading up on the condition that had put her there, preeclampsia, woke something in her.  She’d given already given up on her plan of being a teacher and had dotted around clerical jobs with no real direction. She decided to become a midwife.  This was not a light decision; she had the wrong A-levels, degree level midwifery courses are notoriously hard to get on to and, if you do, they are intellectually, emotionally and physically demanding.  A huge amount of the course is spent working without pay, entrusted with the lives of the women and their babies under your care and also the career of your supervisory midwife, under whose registration you practice.

My wife, who was a hotel receptionist when we first met, who had dotted around temping jobs, took two A-levels in a year and passed them both, secured her place and went on to get a 1st Class Honours degree in midwifery.  I’ve never told her how unspeakably proud I am of her. God, I hope she knows.

In case you don’t know midwives make a difference.  Where there are midwives outcomes for women and babies are empirically and demonstrably better.  In the starkest possible terms, where there are midwives fewer people die.

Because of this a lot of what my wife does is handing healthy babies to healthy parents – I sometimes wonder how many hundreds of people there are in the world had my wife’s hands as the first to ever touch them – but she also explains complications to people, she keeps terrified women who don’t speak our language and are in the worse pain of their life together, she makes (and bears legal responsibility for) huge decisions made in situations of intense pressure, she skips tea-breaks, lunch-breaks, toilet-breaks as a matter of routine to provide care…and sometimes, when all there is to do is wait for a new life to become a tiny corpse, she sits and cuddles a dying baby as it breathes its last and then she goes and makes clay imprints of its tiny, sometimes translucent, hands and feet as a memento for the grieving parents, then she has to give herself a shake and go and see her next patient.

And she does it all for for less money than I get for being pretty good with spreadsheets.

That tiny baby, my daughter, born 16 years ago tonight is now an amazing young lady.  She’s strong, and confident, and clever, and talented and beautiful…and all the other things that a dad should say about his daughter on her 16th, and I wonder if she understands that the one difficulty she’s ever caused us – being born – started that ball rolling on an her mother’s career.  Does she know that career means that she has hundreds of brothers and sisters who are also her mother’s children?

Under the noise of the junior doctor’s strike it’s little noted or cared that midwives are also coming under pressure and face seeing their role drastically reduced.  There’s going to be a fight to keep them, which is a fight for nothing less than the lives of women and children.  That will needs to be a big noisy fights.

But not tonight.

Because it’s midnight.

And this is a secret blog, and a secret love letter to 2 amazing women.

Ssssh!

List of Scottish Independence Referendums

As of the present (see Distortion of time caused by travelling on a vessel at near light speeds) there have been approximately 14 referendums on Scottish independence, as summarised below.

#	Date	First Minister	Turnout	Pro %	Anti %	Comments
1	Sept. 2014	Alex Salmond	3,623,344	45%	55%	Made Saint Referendum the Great in 2150 by Pope Jock I
2	Sept. 2017	Nicola Sturgeon	3,623,342	45%	55%	First referendum where use of pen was legally mandated
3	May 2018	Natalie McGarry	37,409,345,552.8	95%	25%	Result overturned owing to “voting irregularities”
3a	June 2018	Natalie McGarry	290	99%	0%	Voting only open to those in Cornton Vale. Declared an Anti-Referendum by First Minister Rehab Johnson
4	N/A	J K Rowling	4,190,355	10%	90%	Now widely agreed to have been a dream
5	January 2021	David Coburn	4,190,355 (coincidence)	?	?	Results “destroyed” when forces loyal to the SNP stormed and re-took Holyrood
6	June 2027	Brian Spanner	4,800,945	60%	40%	Later revealed to have been ‘Just trolling’
1a	Sept 2014/Sept 2033	Alex Salmond / Wings Over Scotland	4,198,378	63%	37%	Announced as the “real” result of referendum 1, counting the ballot boxes “found” when Wing-troopers stormed Thames House. Scientific testing suggests the dating of the box is made-up as shit
7-10	February 2034	Wings Over Nu-Scotland	5,888,888	45%	55%	Field test for “Referendum every week” theory. Conclusion, “It’s shit”
11	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown	?	?	Most likely occurred after the 2041 announcement of “Let’s all get really pissed for a decade and see if that helps”. Surviving documents suggest major campaign issues were “Which episode of ‘Friends’ was best?” and “Who keeps weeing in the Forth?”
11	Oct 2053	Alex Salmond‘s head in a jar	78,565	87%	13%	Struck down by Supreme Court ruling that Twitter polls don’t count
12	Oct 2064	Alex Salmond‘s head in a bigger jar	6,993,472	45%	55%	Inspiration behind the popular song, “You’ve been asking the same question fir fifty years, can ye nae take a hint, man?”
13	Year 4 of the zombie apocalypse	Shaun ITV2	32,001,007	47%	53%	Famously used the slogan, ‘Let’s cut ourselves free of this toxic wasteland populated only by the walking shells of the hungry dead’.
14	Year 308 of the Exodus	Captain Black of Gen-Ship 8	1	100%	0%	Campaign marred by confusion over what a ‘Scotland’ was or why anybody would want an independent one. Only organiser, Nicola Sturgeon XXVII, voted. Captain declared that any Scotlands found would be independent.